Quantitative interferometric microscopy cytometer based on regularized optical flow algorithm

Cell detections and analysis are important in various fields, such as medical observations and disease diagnoses. In order to analyze the cell parameters as well as observe the samples directly, in this paper, we present an improved quantitative interferometric microscopy cytometer, which can monitor the quantitative phase distributions of bio-samples and realize cellular parameter statistics. The proposed system is able to recover the phase imaging of biological samples in the expanded field of view via a regularized optical flow demodulation algorithm. This algorithm reconstructs the phase distribution with high accuracy with only two interferograms acquired at different time points simplifying the scanning system. Additionally, the method is totally automatic, and therefore it is convenient for establishing a quantitative phase cytometer. Moreover, the phase retrieval approach is robust against noise and background. Excitingly, red blood cells are readily investigated with the quantitative interferometric microscopy cytometer system.